About 10 years ago, everybody wanted to be a blogger. It was the new cool tool in the digital market and it was ideal for people who wanted to share some thoughts on a specific topic or on anything that crossed their minds. After all, the idea of blogging started out as a way to keep a sort of public diary. And that’s exactly what many pioneers of blogging were doing: ranting about life, death, about everything and nothing. Oh how things have changed…
Since then, Facebook has not only grown exponentially, but it has slowly become a platform for more than just photo sharing with your friends. Those early amateur bloggers who had an opinion about everything could now easily do it on Facebook, with higher and instant exposure. For the ones blogging about a specific topic, things have also changed, to some degree. Those who would write reviews about products or services on their blogs, and everyone else who might have endorsed a brand, are still there. But they’re facing new challenges every day, with other platforms increasing in popularity all the time. Such is the case of the extremely popular so-called “influencers” who thrive on Instagram and other social media. On the other hand, platforms like Blogspot disappeared.
If 5-10 years ago, when considering who you would want to write about your business or product, a blogger would probably have been one of the first persons to go to. Now, there are so many other options, that blogging might be neglected as a solution for content marketing.
Such is the situation, that many have asked themselves if blogging is dead.
But blogging is not dead. It has only changed a lot in the past 10 years. And we have data to back that up.
Creating a business blog to grow the visibility of your business
If one type of blog hasn’t died yet, but prospered, it’s the business blog attached to a company’s main website. Most important companies have a blog section on their website, which is important for several reasons:
- Search engines favour the websites that are updated regularly, which is exactly what a blog does
- Search engines also favour websites that are rich in content, that score well on word counts, which is also specific for blogs
- A business blog is an easy to use tool for keeping your customers up-to-date with news about the company and about the industry
- Blogging greatly increases the number of pages that your website will be indexed for
- Blogging can bring new audiences to your website, if you post original, relevant and interesting content
And here is some of the most interesting data about the topic. Getcodeless put together an amazing list of 101 statistics about blogging. Here are some we think are the most relevant:
- Blogging is responsible for 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links
- 10% of blog posts have a steady increase in organic search generated traffic over time
- The above type of blog posts are responsible for 38% of all blog traffic
- 82% of marketers who blog regularly believe they get a positive ROI from it
- There are over 2 million blog posts published daily
- 28% of marketers have reduced their advertising spend to allocate more funds towards content marketing
What about blog content?
If you want your blog to make a difference, than there are a few simple tips to be successful, apart from writing original, good quality content.
- Don’t write short posts. They won’t bring in any traffic. Less than 500 words will not bring you many benefits. In fact, the best ranked blog posts are more likely to be around 1000 words
- Readers like posts that are easy to read, such as those that use bullet lists, many headings, relatively short phrases and paragraphs
- An interesting study by Conversion XL proves how important blog post headlines are, from using negative words (never, worst) and numbers to keeping the number of words in the titles between 5-9 or 16-18
If you want to grow your business using a blog, the content marketing team at Akby can help you build and promote great content. Contact us for an offer.
